Google Judgment

Transcription

[music]

Announcer:  How would you be judged by your Google search records? As believers, we know that it is not only our online behavior that will one day be made known to all.

Michael Pearl:  If you were to do a survey of the Christian life and the sinner's life from afar—if you just surveyed the fruit, the joy, the peace, the life, the quality of life—the Christian would win out every time. In other words, our life is better. The fruit in old age is better than the fruit of a sinner. Everything about the Christian life is better, except going to the mission field, and suffering, or being persecuted and martyred, and that sort of thing that comes about when we serve God. But what a Christian does different than a sinner is we have to exercise a whole lot of self-control and self-denial. The end result is that the Christian is living a life of not doing what he feels like doing, whereas the sinner does the easy thing, what he feels like doing. When he does what he feels like doing, the end result is some pretty bad outcomes—a lot misery, a lot of suffering in this life.

The fact is, if it were not for the hope beyond, without belief in the eternal, in a day of judgment, in a God who cares what we do and how we live, if it were not for that, we wouldn't exercise self-denial. We wouldn't deny ourselves immediate gratification. The sinner just immediately gratifies himself.

We constantly battle our flesh and do what is right rather than what we feel like doing in this world. It's not in order to gain eternal life that we do that, but it is the sure and certain knowledge that we are eternal people and that good is good, and it's holy, and it's pure, and it's lovely. That's what we want to be, now and in eternity.

We want to please God and honor God, but at the same time we do fear God. We fear God. We fear of the Day of Judgment. It constrains us. The love of Christ constrains us and the fear of coming judgment constrains us.

If you profess to believe in eternity, that you are an eternal being, that you will stand before God, and you deny yourself many things because of that, but there are secret indulgences where you pretend to be a Christian but, in fact, you live like a heathen in some secret ways, then I submit unto you that you don't really believe in eternity. You really don't believe that you are an eternal creature who will live forever in the presence of God. You'd be a sheer fool to harbor secret sins, knowing they'll only be secret for a very short time. They're all coming to light.

When I was at the knife throw, beside me in the lane was a new thrower from California. Big, nice looking, bright young fellow. I said to him, "What do you do for a living?" He said, "I am an engineer for Google." I said, "Then, you know all about us, don't you?" He said, "Everything." He said, "I know everything." He said, "I know everything that everybody does. What they watch, what they see, what they research. We have the records and they never go away." I said, "You can publish mine if you want. You can publish it."

Now, he said that ominously. [laughs] He did. He felt the power that was in his hands. He knows everybody that's on any kind of media at all. He knows you. The records are there, and they stay there. He has the power. If he didn't like me, he’d go back and dig all that stuff out and make it public.

The people who work there—just common, old, ordinary people—if they get the notion, they can look you up and publish everything about you.

Now, would that change your habits any, if you knew you had an enemy in Google?

[laughter]

Michael:  What about the fact that God is keeping records? That the angels are observing? That everything will be brought into judgment, with every secret thing? Everything will be made manifest in that Day of Judgment. If you really believed that, it would change the way you live. If you have secret sins, you don't believe that. You're living in some kind of a delusion, that somehow it won't be known. That's called a fool. That's an idiot fool. If you really are a believer, and you really believe, it will affect the way you live here and now, and in secret. What you do now will affect your eternity.

[music]

Announcer:  We're really glad you listened today and we hope that you were blessed. Remember, check our always changing online specials.